Microsoft rounds up 2016 and teases what's to come this year

Microsoft has just published a new blog post that's revealed a range of notable Xbox statistics and achievements from 2016; almost 400 new games were released for the Xbox One last year and in addition to this, Xbox One owners put in more than 265 million hours for Xbox 360 games through the Backwards Compatibility system.

According to the post, Gears of War 4 has seen an incredible response from the community with near;y 23 million matches played in the Versus Multiplayer and Horde modes alone. This wasn't the only notable game however, as Forza Horizon 3 became the best-selling and highest-rated racing game of the year with over 14 million players split between the Xbox One and Windows 10 platforms.

In addition to this, Microsoft has revealed that the Xbox Play Anywhere program has been incredibly successful; players put over 2.5 billion hours into Windows 10 games during November 2016 alone. The Xbox Design Lab didn't collect many positive comments from critics when it was first revealed at E3 but over 2.4 million personalized designs have been created since it was released this year.

While the blog post details some of the biggest achievements from 2016, it also teases a variety of changes that will be coming in 2017. There are a range of quality games coming this spring which will all have Xbox Live Support and many of them will be available in the Xbox Play Anywhere program.

It's also been revealed that new content and expansions will be coming for a range of first party titles such as Gears of War 4 and ReCore however, no details about these add-ons have been revealed so far. Various changes have also been confirmed for the Xbox Live systems which should be coming over the next few months.